The Dumb Vegan Experience: the Podcast NOBODY Was Asking For!

I bunderson hey I'm speaking to the
enigmatic and brilliant dumb vegan what's up man some of the websites are used are blocked in China and and some are not so I'm currently streaming to you nail which is a miracle of modern science that I can do that from China and I'm talking to you by skypes that's great and I'm recording audio only so great oh so we can use this a podcast or if you want to do so let's start with a really edgy questions maybe you have questions for me you can hit me with whatever man i'm really not shy so my deep and incisive first question for you is how long have you been vegan um two and a half years well alright not bad and uh uh what role did free lee's difficult to define sex if you'll have in your conversion to veganism or your decision to start a YouTube channel or both um not zero percent i will say that two and a half years ago i just i ask that question probably cuz i think to a half years ago what is said freely was just at about her peak of kind of unquestioned influence you know on on youtube and uh you know she got covered in the newspapers and so on i would say two and a half years ago she was pretty much at the pinnacle of her influence so obviously could be complete coincidence but i just thought it asked because you really come up in the time when her shadow was the longest sure yeah it's a it's a fair question and it's not something that I would steer away from her try to deny I mean the influence of freely durianrider but hey you know just as much the influence of forks over knives and you know the girl in college that took me to a place in ordered tofu and I didn't know what the hell she was talking about and didn't think I could ever do it because I was allergic to so I and you know and then those you know at all it's all paints a big picture you know I can't say was one thing or other but i certainly don't deny somebody like free Lisa influence on my cell phone you know I was a your random person lurking around on YouTube and finding all sorts of social media personalities talking about such things so sure and yeah two and a half years ago I mean she was some I mean I don't know I think could be wrong about this but I feel like that's kind of when she started doing the the kind of video call outs where she would throw in the like factory farm footage type of stuff is that is that wrong is that was that not yep they might have been less than that I don't know yep yep yeah would look I mean there are a lot of things interesting what you just said one that leaps out to be those so you you're allergic to soy so you actually a soy free vegan Wow well well here's the thing I've been I was I've been allergic to legumes uh since I was a young whippersnapper and I've actually gotten over some of them specifically probably trying out more stuff just out of curiosity you know what's going vegan so um yeah I can actually eat so I know it's weird man like I don't know exactly what the deal is and there's a there in the lagoon families so like I've been low waist allergic to peanuts right and you know I can't I can eat a little bit of some of that stuff now and then there's some that I just can't even have a single bite up but you can't have a single bite of a lintel or green peas or I'll just you know I have a really bad allergic reaction but I've actually kind of curved it with soy and I don't know why that is and i didn't think i could have black beans or refried beans there no not necessarily refried I didn't large free refried beans of course but uh you know like I didn't think I could have those at all and it's weird like I can eat those now all the time so I maybe never was allergic to some of these types of things that i lumped in with all ookums I don't know I was always kind of safe well that's really interesting me the only reason I know about that allergy was that once and i was living in laos i met a really cute attractive woman and i wouldn't even say we dated but we went out to restaurants a couple times and yet it's not dating I assure you but you know I I was interested in her she was there doing research and humanitarian work too so we had we had some obvious interest income but when the first thing she said to me was she could never be vegan because she had the most extreme form of that allergy probably it's the same medical condition she had a more extreme part a more extreme case of it but for her if she ate any legumes whatsoever her heart would up beating and she needed to have I'm sorry i forgot the chemical she needed something directly injected into her heart to restart the heart beating it was absolutely the most extreme form but I remember saying to her right off the bat I was like you're cute but I'm not gonna stop eating be serious stuff man I mean there's all sorts of people you know all sorts of allergies that like you you would never think of in a year about it and then they're like well I'm gonna tell you it'll kill me if I don't take a shot with a epinephrine or whatever right right so in terms of legumes started to Stefan one second okay can you eat peas can you eat some of the some sort supporting that are not true beans because a pea technically is not a bean but I don't know how it falls into that that LG uh right so yeah I mean I can't have those so that and that could precisely be you know what it is is it's you know maybe it's not the beans that I like I say I mean I think III maybe never was allergic to soy but it was you know potentially in like something and i associated it with cuz maybe there was also peas in whatever I thought and then I took you know pinpointed it as 0 must be the soy but you know I didn't know yeah yeah so I know sorry I don't just kind of derail in the conversation but I think it is probably interested in people and it's interesting to me I I feel like I couldn't survive without beans so you know it's maybe maybe this is a dumb question the kick your dumb vegan but uh what do you do for protein um I mean well I do I mean now I I eat black beans and things like that now so I like I say I wasn't I there's a really good chance i was actually never allergic to certain kinds of beans like black beans or you know red beans white beans or whatever but now once i figured out that i wasn't allergic to them i do now eat them all the time well so i just made another bizarre reason why i know a bit about this is that you know I've studied ancient languages also and one of the things I was trying to figure out because in translating ancient languages even if you're interested philosophy or politics historically before the modern era before the discovery of you know North America columbusoh discovery of Haiti by Columbus whatever you wanna say um you know when you have words that mean bean I was wondering what does this actually mean which I what beans in ancient Greece or ancient India or ancient China I was looking at stuff of what I figured out is EO today we have this one word in English bean but actually in terms of you know evolutionary history and even the history of human culture and civilization the they have very different histories you know one thing that we call a bean really comes from Mexico and reflects you know whole ancient history of human cultivation in Mexico and another I mean like soy beans soy beans are genuinely part of the history of China for more than 30,000 years so they're a toad I we just have one word we just call beans but yeah so I'm not surprised when you say it turns out you can eat black beans but apparently you can't eat many other kinds of legumes yeah that's good news black beans are fabulous protein sources right right i mean i get we're saying there we laugh a lot of things together you know in modern culture as as that there are you know in similar families and things but that's there's no reason to necessarily lump them in as closely as we do together you know they are they're kind of lots of things are really their own thing and we we do kind of want them together one that's not necessarily appropriate but yeah then you kind of learn you know like I mean there's you know like different beans have different levels of carbohydrate versus protein constant like soybeans are much higher protein than like you know a black pain but you know there they are pretty similar still I see why you know a soybean is called a soybean or you know right so I want to push you on your earlier admission there was some good looking girl in college who took you to a restaurant and ate tofu in front of you and this was a turning point take me take me back to that moment this is when you first heard the the concept of veganism for concept of vegetarianism maybe what what happened uh well no I guess I kind of I kind of wished that a little bit but I think that um it's a it's a good example of like somebody that was vegan you know I didn't meet too many vegans probably the first time I ever heard the concept of veganism was on The Simpsons when Lisa was considering going vegetarian or did but then like at the end the episode she's in the kwik-e-mart and she's eating that she's like she couldn't get ready to [ __ ] off vegetarianism because she just came from the barbecue where Homer was you know like doing his barbecue thing and she's getting ready to eat a hotdog and then she takes a bite and a poo is like oh you're enjoying my tofu hot dogs and then she's like tofu and then anyway she finds out the food he doesn't say vegan but he says he doesn't need anything that comes from an animal so that was probably technically my first exposure to the idea of veganism but you know I didn't it didn't stick when I was seven years old yeah didn't you start looking into it then or anything yeah so now I was using that example because i think you know she was one of the only vegan said really met in my life you know that i talk to and it actually talked about it anyway uh and I mean you know III thought I was like I was like oh yeah well that's cool and then I remember asking her it's kind of funny I was like well I'm allergic to you know so I like what did that conversation there but like I at least thought that I was no highly allergic to soy and I was like so you know I I don't and I end all the good so I was like so I don't know if I could get the protein she would kind of like was like she was kind of quiet she's like yeah I guess so but like I mean she I kind of wonder if she was like well there's other ways to you know get present if you want to do it but she didn't say that so um that's cool with the progress your condition have you been working I've been working with the doctor to figure that's the photo has it just been traveling error for you figure out what you can and can't eat it sounds like it's been you know you've been yeah I mean I went to an allergist once when I was 12 but like they said I was looked like there were the results as they sent me like they said I was allergic to grass and like they didn't even I can't you know it was like it seemed really faulty I'm like I didn't really trust the diagnosis I mean I don't know it didn't it did do it wasn't had anything because I've never had any problems grass or I think they said I was there two dogs two or something and I was like well not so what can you do yeah yeah it's it no I mean I got I got used to it really quick when I was young and I just I just figured out what I could have and what I kind of haven't just rolled with it and it's never been you know I if I eat something that I can't have I just take a benadryl and I'm pretty good to go in 20 minutes yeah so just saying above myself but by contrast I did not learn about veganism from The Simpsons but you know it's funny for me growing up I grew up in Toronto Canada and you know like my childhood really child it was so much dominated by left wing ideology and like left-wing politics is all this emphasis on changing the world through helping the poor the workers the fact you know these kind of left with your labor unions that's the idea of progress and whenever the issues of animal rights or veganism came up anything like that vegetarianism veganism that was always lumped into one category with kind of superstition and Hinduism you know and to be fair it's not completely without reason but in my childhood it wasn't that I hadn't heard of vegetarianism or veganism but there was this sense that that was part of the feudal medieval backwards religious world whereas the future was going to be you know people putting on spacesuits and you know giant robots fighting each other in World War three and that kind of thing so this really was a sense for me the transition in a lot of ways was switching from thinking about vegetarianism as part of the past to being an important part of the present in the future but I've got to say in a sense I always knew the concept and it was always there to compete with the other big ideas I'd say that's my work